Crit vs Mastery in a 10 man envioment

First of all i apologize if this has been said before so feel free to lock this thread and point me in the right direction.
Over the last few weeks after going from a shadow priest to a disc priest for the guild purposes i noticed all disc priests stacked mastery for absorbs what makes perfect sense in a 25 man guild. While browsing this forums and many other priest forums i notice the odd post about crit is better than mastery for 10 man healing, so i thought i would search the internet for a better answer but i wasn't about to find enough information to warrant a respec from mastery.

Ive searched for some of the best guild in the world to see how they spec their priests and yet again its totally different from what ive read and been told, also im not willing to just copy these top guilds priests without having a decent understanding.

So i was hoping some of the priest community of this forums might be able to enlighten me.

Just try them all out and see what works best for you, or even change depending on which boss you're progressing on at the moment. Personally I generally go with haste for an atonement heavy healing style in 10man. Why not crit? Crit is random, haste is reliable, and I have enough spirit to handle it as long as I'm very careful with my AA usage. I was planning to go mastery for Garalon heroic progress due to SS on cd, but it worked just fine with my haste reforge so meh. I expect I'll need a mastery reforge/regem once we get to the fights that demand more from the healers, though.

if you are poh spamming, mastery is better than crit.
once you move away from guaranteed DA, mastery becomes significantly weaker.

if you are tank healing and/or healing through atonement, crit is nice.
more frequent smaller DA > less frequent larger DA

if the boss has some type of increased damage taken mechanic, atonement with crit is especially good, as the DA shields that you would get by stacking mastery might be over the DA cap already, and more frequent DA's are useful.

going all mastery, all crit, or a mix of the two won't hurt you, you might not even notice much of a difference. i only reforged to crit for one fight this tier, otherwise was full mastery.

crit also contributes to your dps as a disc priest, whether that is meaningful depends on other factors.

This thread might be interesting to you. I won't repeat my entire post but mastery is indeed comparatively weaker in 10 than in 25 man, for me and my playstyle it's still stronger than crit atm though (post 5.2, probably not).

As I think I've posted so many times in the past on these haste vs. mastery, crit vs mastery, etc. posts.....healing stat priority is different for everyone. You have to decide what works best for your playstyle and raid group. It varies by who you're healing with, what your ilvl is, what fights you are progressing through, what your spell breakdown looks like. The best advice you can get is to try out different things and use what works for YOU. I personally run a mastery-haste split build, because half my disc gear is from my shadow spec. It works great for my 10 man guild that is just starting to work through heroic modes (we're pretty casual), but might not work for yours. Try some things out and check logs. Post them here and we can help you decide what might look better for you based on your spells and group. You have to be open to experiment a bit sometimes, reforging isn't that expensive. Try some things and have fun!

Discs at the moment seem to prefer to play retarded-style: huge amounts of useless spirit, stack mastery, basically stand there spamming poh for all the fight.
If on the other hand you are using a lot of your other spells then yes crit might be a good idea, but I'd suggest to start off by gemming INT. Intellect is the ONLY stat that will upgrade ALL your spells, including smite, including your lvl90 talent, everything.
Seeing as 7-8k spirit is more than enough (if you know how to track your rapture cooldown and actually know how to play disc) then intellect is the basic choice if you don't enjoy standing there like a retard spamming one spell for 10 minutes.

How is it retarded to use our by far most powerful and efficient spell (realistically)?
Would be nice if you could explain what you're doing and why it's better.

Me like most priests are trying to use the right tool for the job every cast, it just happens that that is often PoH.
PoH is the go to spell when there's a lot of dmg going on. You'd be a retard not to gear around that imo.

I do agree however that most priests sacrifice too much int and many probably run more spirit than they actually *need*, but I think a lot of people like having that cushion there, myself included (I run 11k spirit buffed).

We run a 10 man with 2 disc priests, me stacking mastery and other one going crit. Our gear is pretty much the same, except he has a 4p and I'm only on 2p. On an farm fight our HPS is about the same, but his DPS would be twice or even more that of mine. But on harder fights, it's really not a competition. Sometimes my spirit shells alone account for more than his total healing with top 3 heals, not to mention huge DAs all over the place.

I might be wrong here, but I feel like many people are just looking for a excuse to go crit instead of mastery, since you can get completely trashed and oom really fast if you mess up mastery speced, while it's way harder to mess up with crit, since you just tunnel the boss most of the time anyway. With a lot of mastery you really need to learn the fight and know where you can preshield, not just react tot he damage when it happened.

I've always gemmed and enchanted under the impression that intentionally get more crit was stupid.

stack mastery IMO
especially if youre disc.

Hum...

Stack crit.

Unless of course you've adopted the brain-dead gameplay of spaming poh all day long and not using a single of your other spells, then yes, stacking mastery is more effective if you've got a retarded playstyle like that.

Otherwise for normal people crit is excellent. ESPECIALLY as disc...

And as someone else said in another thread who just cleaned 16/16heroic, WHENEVER you can get away with smiting instead of poh, you should, because in progress fights, every second shorter the fight can be, makes an enormous difference.
So whenever no one will die if you spam smite for 10 sec instead of poh, you should definitely spam smite because that 500k damage you did in 10 seconds means the fight will be that few seconds shorter.

Spamming poh will get your other healer lower numbers, and your numbers might go up slightly, but then you don't understand what "efficiency" means and you'll probably never do the progress you would with a more efficient playstyle.

I'm going to Crit. I can stack spirit shell to cap in 2 casts with crit reforge, why bother reforging for mastery? Also so far we've 2 healed every heroic we've done (11/16) and I still do a tonne of atonement healing.

I'm going to Crit. I can stack spirit shell to cap in 2 casts with crit reforge, why bother reforging for mastery? Also so far we've 2 healed every heroic we've done (11/16) and I still do a tonne of atonement healing.